“It suits you.” He takes my hand and twists the bracelet around to get a better look. “I’ve always thought you looked good in organic jewelry,” he says with a wink, and the flakes of seaweed in my jewelry box flash across my mind.
“What do you say?” He squeezes my hand and nods down at the bracelet. “Want to make a run for it?”
I roll my eyes and drop his hand. “After the dine-and-dash disaster of 2019, I’m going to say no.”
Seb had forgotten his wallet when we were out to dinner one night at a little hole-in-the-wall on St. Mark’s Place not far from my apartment, and I hadn’t brought anything, assuming he was going to pick up the check (I’d gotten the last one). He convinced me to dash after we’d finished our entrees, but predictably, the restaurant caught us. If I hadn’t convinced the owner to take Seb’s watch as collateral while we waited for Emma to come down to the restaurant with my purse, we’d probably have found ourselves sitting in some Manhattan precinct office, awaiting sentencing for Grand Theft Dumplings.
“Guess I’ve got to pay for it, then,” Sebastian says, his eyes sparkling.
He gives the crafter some money for the bracelet, and we maneuver through the crowd that seems to have grown even denser since we got here.
We find an empty picnic table on a lawn near the bandstand, and Seb takes a seat beside me, his hand coming up tomy back. Resting beneath my shoulder blades, his thumb rubs up and down along the bare skin of my spine, exposed from the open back of the coral dress, and even though the weather is mild, I swallow and suppress a shiver. I’m not sure if I should lean away, but before I can decide, Sebastian’s hand drops to the bench, as if he’s not sure either.
Sebastian lifts his beer bottle in a toast, his eyes sparkling down at me. “To losing sight of the shore.”
Smiling at the familiar words, I lift the cool glass bottle to my lips. The quote has always been one of Sebastian’s favorites.Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.That’s how it’s always been with Sebastian. Like we were throwing ourselves into the unknown with the hope that we’d land somewhere new and dazzling.
“This might sound corny to say.” Sebastian doesn’t look at me as he sets his beer gently on the table. “But this feels like fate.” His bright blue eyes come to mine, and I’m struck by the sincerity in them. They’re totally serious, free of the mirth that usually sparks in them. “It feels like fate,” he repeats, “that we were both in the Pacific Islands at the same time. That we got to reconnect.”
“Would it still be fate if it had been one of your other exes in Hawaii this week?” I tease.
“If you must know,” he says, almost primly, “I don’t keep tabs on any of my other exes.”
That surprises me. “Really?”
“Really. You’re special, Sybil Rain. It’s like…” He trails a hand through his hair. “I never felt like the door was fully closed with us, you know?”
I swallow and nod. “I felt that way for a long time too. Until…”
“Until you met him.”
“Yeah.” I begin to peel the label off my beer bottle.
He presses his lips together and looks away, toward the hula dancers.
“You were really right for me, for a certain time in my life, Seb,” I say, willing him to believe me. “But I don’t think we ever would have been right forever. We just didn’t want the same things.”
“Is this about Tokyo?” Seb asks, a slight edge of defensiveness creeping into his voice. “Because I did apologize for that, Sybil. I thought youwantedto come with me.”
“AndIthought you were going to pick me up. Like you said you would.”
The debacle was classic Sebastian. He always means what he says when he says it, but somehow, something always seems to come up. An opportunity he can’t say no to. A freak traffic delay that maybe could have been avoided if he hadn’t waited to leave until the last minute. A misunderstanding because he was only half listening when making plans…
I remember sitting at the arrivals gate at Tokyo-Haneda International Airport, waiting for Seb to pick me up. Waiting hours, with no international cell phone plan, in a foreign country where I didn’t speak a word of the language, didn’t know the address of the place I was going to be staying at. Finally, after I’d cried myself to sleep on a bench near baggage claim, Sebastian came and found me. He’d gotten the times wrong. He was wrapped up in a shoot. He was sorry. I accepted his apology and went to stay with him in his new Tokyo apartment for the week like we’d planned, but the sour, stilted feeling between us lasted the whole trip. We were planning to getmarried; I still had that strand of kelp wrapped around my finger. But I couldn’t stop thinking that while I had been willing to drop everything and join him on the other side of the world, he hadn’t been willing to drop his photo shoot to meet me halfway across the city. When the trip was over, I returned home, and he stayed. That was that. I think the trip had simply confirmed what I’d always suspected. That some part of me was always going to be left disappointed and heartbroken by Sebastian.
“I don’t want to talk about Tokyo,” I say. “That’s water under the bridge. Besides, that’s not even what I meant, about wanting different things.”
A squeal of microphone feedback makes us both wince. On the stage, the hula dancers have been replaced by a new band. They have just finished setting up, and the lead singer steps up to the mic as the musicians start playing a sweet folk song.
Seb and I watch a father pull his young daughter onto the street in front of the bandstand. She places her little feet on top of his, and they start dancing—really just swaying in place—her crooked smile beaming up at him.
“Did you ever want kids?” The words tumble out of me. I can’t look at Seb while I wait for his answer, so I start picking at the label on my beer again.
After a moment, I hear Seb say, “Not really, no.” He says it simply, not apologetic or defiant. Just a statement of fact. “I mean, I love my nephews like crazy, but… I never wanted that life for myself. I value my spontaneity too much.” He chuckles. “I don’t know if you know this about me, but I kiiiind of like winging it.”
This gets a laugh from me. “You don’t say?”
“I do, in fact.”
